Changes, Choices, Consequences
by TrekFan101
Summary: Post Jusendo deviation. Not a R A. Smidgen of SM for flavour. Forgotten first fic, found on an old thumb drive :) WiP


Standard firstfic warning. I found this on an old USB drive (128Megs). Figured I'd try and upload it see how this'd be received. :)

Ranma ½ is copyrighted to Takahashi Rumiko and whomever she has legal agreements with. I do not claim any kind of right to the characters created by Ms. Takahashi, but characters created by me are mine and the story is mine. Meant for enjoyment by fans that were sorry to see the Ranma ½ series end. I have read all of the manga and seen a few episodes of the anime. Thanks to my friend brwayne for introducing me to the wonderful world of manga in early 2004.

NOT a R+A. I never had any preference until I read Zen's **brilliant** "Bitter End". This fanfic is in salute to a master storyteller who did take fanfics to where no fanfic has gone before... ^_^

Changes, Choices, Consequences

-China. A few days after the Jusendo battle, on the way back to Japan. Dusk.-

Control. It always came back to control. Control of his mind and body, and the Art was the **only** method he had for any kind of control. Pathetic little in his life was in his hands anyway. Might as well revel in what little was left as **his** choice. Right now, he was focused on controlling something rare for him, anger.

Anger at a choice made hastily. An anger that his use of the Art could have had repercussions he had not even stopped to consider. At the same time Ranma also felt relief, mainly when he witnessed Saffron 'hatch' from his egg, as an infant, again. Not that he had even considered Saffron's ability to be reborn, during the fight.

Now, a few days later, Ranma was lost deep in thought. It all came back to the same issue. _Was is it right to 'kill' a king who kept his entire people alive, for the sake of one person? Even if I lo.. lo.. like her._ Disturbingly, no matter which way Ranma justified himself, the answer was no. _I jumped into a situation without full knowledge of the consequences of my actions. And I used my Art to do something no martial artist following the code would have done. I let my emotions focus my fight's direction. Without caring about who got hurt in the sidelines._ 'Just like Ryoga!', a small voice whispered in his mind. Ranma grimaced, realizing the truth of that point. _And then I tried to use sheer force is a head to head battle to the death, with a being who should have crushed me without a thought. I jumped into a battle without thinking about my opponent's abilities or strengths, deluding myself that I would have an easy win, simply because I always won against all my previous opponents._ 'Just like Akane!'. The little voice was getting irritating now.

Nonetheless, Ranma could not ignore the fact that he was guilty of the same mistakes Akane and Ryoga made during their fights. It was all the more galling, because he had always pointed these traits out as something that made them lesser martial artists than he was. And now, he had made the same mistake they always did. And considering his opponent, he was sure that owed more than one Kami a prayer of thanks for his survival.

Ranma also realized the value of information, like Nabiki did. Just because he **could** take blows from an opponent, didn't mean he **had** to... And one clean 'blow' from Saffron should have left him 'extra crispy'. Realizing how many times he had come close to a 'blow' from Saffron, Ranma decided that he owed at least a dozen Kami for their help and blessings.

Ranma was now getting used to feeling of incredible exhaustion he had been feeling when the battle ended. It was really unusual for him, considering that he usually recovered from intense fights, back to his full fighting capacity within hours, at most. He was recovering, but much, much slower than he expected. Or hoped.

After the first few chi blasts in the final battle, the strain of going down the mountainside and fighting at the same time had all but emptied Ranma's chi reserves. Although he did have amazing abilities to use his chi, he simply did not have a vast reservoir of chi available like, say, the Old Lech or the Old Ghoul. They had built and tended those reserves over centuries, something he was yet to do. So Ranma, faced with a fresh opponent, with his own chi almost gone, had reached for a technique he wasn't too confident about. He attempted his own variant of Hinako-sensei's chi absorption technique. It was one of the very few techniques he had been unable to successfully imitate or modify for his own use. The ability to successfully manipulate your own chi was a skill only a handful of people on earth could claim, but to control it to a degree where you could directly access and direct another person's chi was several degrees of magnitude more difficult. Ranma had been unable to make any headway in adapting the technique for his own use. Ranma knew, on some level, that some day he would need a technique this radical. He also hoped that the breakthrough for the skill would come through when his need was most desperate, as it had far too many times before. He had mentally marked that technique as one that had to be learned as a child for complete mastery, before one's own chi paths were set in their ways. Even the Old Lech could only suck small amounts of chi and had to physically touch his 'donors' to do it, while Hinako could do it from a few metres away. This was despite the fact that the Lech was the one who had taught Hinako the technique in the first place.

He started channelling all the ambient ki through his battle aura. He only needed a small amount of his personal chi to channel and direct it, and the surrounding air was absolutely saturated with it. And Saffron was pumping out more. Ranma grimaced at the memory.

The reason Ranma did not like the technique was that his previous, and only, experience with it was pretty painful and exhausting. He had made up the technique on the fly during his last seconds of battle with Herb. He had had to use the ambient ki to protect himself when an entire mountain seemed to collapse around him. And that had left him dizzy and exhausted for several hours. And it had taken over a week to fully recover. A painful week at that.

It was like connecting firehose worth of pressure to his blood stream. Or chi stream in this case. You reached for that option when everything else failed and hoped to the Kami that victory was worth the agony. It was a huge short-term boost to his abilities, but the time spent recovering from it did not make it practical. Especially considering he had more than enough enemies who would not hesitate to attack in his moment of weakness.

Ranma silently bore the pain, simply because he did not know how to conquer the pain and it did not seem to be killing him. If it was a physical pain and something was injured, broken or torn, he could go to Dr. Tofu. If it was something as traumatic as the Neko-ken, he at least had the option of withdrawing his mind into the void of his psyche until he recovered. But this was pure pain in ways he wasn't aware were capable of hurting. And that was the effect of using his technique for about half minute on that day.

_And I fought Saffron for close to an hour... This is going to hurt. A LOT. For a long, LONG time._ During Ranma's first use of this technique against Herb he had felt like a baby trying to control a firehose at full blast. This time it felt like his chi streams or channels were the hose. And the 'pressure' had stretched and mangled his chi pathways. And his body was struggling to cope and compensate. Ranma could only hope that the pain hinted at healing, like a physical wound.

What Ranma did not realize was that the pain was a side effect of his healing, but also a demand from his body to rest. His body, simply put, looked at how large his chi reservoir was and how much of it was empty. Of course, the extended use of the ambient chi technique had stretched the reservoir to gargantuan proportions inside an hour. So Ranma's 'internal' chi amount was registering as 'critically low'. Saotome Ranma had never come so close to death and ironically it was because his own body could not acknowledge his capacity to adapt and change so rapidly. And he didn't even realize it. Had he not been so lost in his thoughts and heeded his body's demand for rest, he would probably have been catatonic within hours, after which a coma would have led to his eventual death. Instead Ranma was eating, building up his reserves of chi and walking toward Japan despite his exhaustion. His body also started to unconsciously draw small amounts of environmental ki to augment his reserves. The food kept his body fuelled. And the movement from area to area kept a fresh flow of ki steadily flowing into his reserves. Both of which would not have been possible if he had gone to sleep.

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